Why are you using Puppy 2.14? I'd think the latest Wary would be a better choice. It should have all the hardware drivers you'll need, plus a better network connection wizard.

To answer your question directly, Puppy does indeed connect directly to the Ethernet and to your router. That may be its strongest suit. However, to get connected to the Internet through your router may require some fiddling with the settings in your router. I'd say that if Windows could connect through the router, then Puppy should be able to do it with no problem. But in any case, try a later version of Puppy.

Many thanks guys for responding.
I used to try Wary 5.3 and it didn't start. Just in case I tried again right now and it's all the same:
Searching for Puppy files.....puppy_wary_5.3.sfs not found. Dropping out to initial ramdisk console...
The file exists in C:\ as instructed, its name is exactly "puppy_wary_5.3.sfs", I even made a defrag of the drive this time... and it's still not found.
Exactly the same happens even with 2.17 and only 2.14X boots normally.

The machine in question is 96-97 IBM ThinkPad 560E, very cute laptop with P166(mmx), 80Gb ram (it's max) and 2Gb hard drive. It has pcmcia slots type2 16bit and none other removable media. I tried pcmcia2usb adapters and it doesn't work, probably because of 16bit bus.
I'm trying to be realistic: the machine is quite old so no miracles expected...
Used to read a thread where somebody wanted to have modern desktop on P100 machine and was asking what linux distro could serve his goal. Imho the best distro recommended was Gazolinux: just pоur it on the top and fire a match...
The guy who gave me away the laptop with Win95 said: "It's useless long ago: no internet, no office, no cdrom, no usb, no way to install something...it's just a typewriter: type in Wordpad and print through parallel port."
I got w2k on it (now back to win98SE), office suite, internet/network and I even got Puppy on it running as fast as win98. The laptop is fully usable now, practically usable, I'm not about beauty of modern browsers rendering tons of commercials.
But with K-Meleon (and I believe with Dillo too) I can check e-mail, download files, get info from the Internet. Even some business work could be done from it.

So I only need the Internet on Puppy...Why not?
The driver is correct.
Win98/W2K connect like 123.
Any OS I tried before connects with the same cable/router.

The problem seems in Puppy configuration.
So the driver is fine, the interface was found...what else? Only ip/dns/host/domain configuration remains.
I could assign static IP for this machine but what's wrong with DHCP?
I never had problems with resolv.conf file so I'm not sure is it normal if it's empty or it's a trouble.
There are also other related files in /etc: hostname, hosts, host.conf.
How the files from working system look like?
Thanks again.

I really can't help you with connecting to the Internet. I just don't know much about it. I've never needed to learn because Puppy always connects without any problem. I think we should work on getting Wary 5.3 to work in your computer. First of all, have you created a swap partition? With only 80 MB of RAM, you'll need a swap partition of at least 256 MB on the hard disk drive.

How did you install Puppy 2.14? For that matter, how did you install W2k without a CD drive?

Thanks for your help, Flash!
I pulled the hdd out of laptop and plugged it into desktop machine to prepare, format and copy win98/w2k installation files. Then replugged into laptop, boot to dos and ran setup.
For puppy I did simple frugal install first and then ran installer to make full install to ext2 partition. Currently I have:
hda1, fat16 - win98+office97+frugal puppy ~1.2Gb (puppy files with 64Mb save file = about 200Mb)
hda2, ext2 - puppy full -660Mb
hda3, swap -80Mb
I still keep frugal puppy because I actually don't see any difference in behavior between frugal puppy and full puppy so I'm thinking to simply delete full install, resize hda1 to full disk and have more space. But not sure yet.
Small hdd is a huge problem and I couldn't find 4-5Gb hdd so far: they recycle right away all hdds which are smaller than 20Gb. For me they found 30Gb but bios doesn't see that drive at all.
Another problem is old bios v.1.04. Last one (1.13) allows disks up to 8Gb and newer hdds so I would probably able to see 8Gb out of 30 but ibm flash utility requires fully charged battery to run but such a battery is sweet dreams nowadays. BTW I have an idea to try linux flash utility to update the bios.
Moreover the latest bios also provides full support for w2k: at the moment I can run w2k with office2K but the installation creates enormous fragmentation, I need to defrag after each session otherwise it runs too sluggish. That's why I'm back to win98SE for now.

As to Wary 5.3 I of course would be happy to run latest version (I do started with it) but besides cpu-kernel incompatibility (I'm guessing it's the reason why "not found") I'm afraid that modern puppy would run very slow (if at all) on my ancient machine.
Besides I believe it's great learning experience to setup internet on puppy manually.
If I could take a look at those puppy files (hostname, host.conf, hosts, resolv.conf) from a working system I would try to figure out what should I have in my setup. I tried Ubuntu files as samples but no luck. Could you show me your files?

PS. Running now Wary5.3 from LiveCD on another laptop, also not too young but it has cdrom, usb2.0, wifi, P5(centrino) 1.7Ghz, 512Mb ram and 30Gb hdd. It is Dell D800.
Puppy runs amazingly, I would say it's a rocket puppy. No problem with wired, wireless WPA - all work like a charm, just great nothing more to say... yeah...but this laptop runs XP sp3 and ubuntu 10.04. It doesn't run Ubuntu 12.04, Mageia2 and Fedora17 but it runs win7 though not really great perhaps because of only 32Mb of video ram. So... this is not a retireе but still on-duty laptop

I just checked those files: resolv.conf, hosts, host.conf, hostname here and they are the same as I have on TP-560E...thus still no clue

Well, I'm out of my depth trying to work with such an old computer and so little RAM. Here's an article from 2007 by some guy who put Slackware Linux on a laptop like yours. Maybe what he did could be adapted to Puppy. There's a link at the bottom of the page to a company which replaces the cells in your battery. They seem to still be in business.

Hi zeiz, the IP address your laptop is picking up shows that it is not successfully negotiating a dhcp connection with your router. This might be a mismatch between the firmware/design of the router, and the particular dhcpcd code that Puppy is running.

If that is the problem I would suggest trying some other puppies around that same vintage, as not all of them had the same issue. I would also suggest trying pUPnGO_2012 which is available here:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=78941
It is very lightweight, so might be worth a go just to see if it will run on that laptop - but it is quite different to other puppies so really only useful to test the link to the router via linux. (pupngo is a work in progress, but surprisingly good in terms of it's inbuilt drivers. The wired connection to the router seemed to work automatically on my hardware without running any wizard)

I will try to identify some other small pups that might be worth a try - but be aware that 80Mb won't let you do much in terms of websurfing with a modern browser.

I also started a topic once looking for small isos that could be burnt to a credit card cd. A small iso is not necessarily any guarantee of good ram usage, but there are links on that topic to lots of older pups that might be of interest (including Catdude's links to quite a collection):
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=76562Last edited by greengeek on Sat 13 Oct 2012, 01:51; edited 1 time in total

WOW! Guys, many thanks for your help!
Obviously it will take some time to try all of that, I'll update how it's going.
In meantime I tried: 215CE, 301, 412png - neither works.
215 is still bootable but it installs with tons of errors and then preX environment doesn't work (but should) and X - oh, just tears: looks like support for ISA was dropped in this version.
With 2 others same old song: pup_whatever.sfs not found. Drop...
BTW what it really means: not found?
On the other hand I still use the same lines in menu.lst:

I also tried slitaz-3.0-lowram. It runs (X - out of box!) but very slow and also doesn't do networking, even worse: only "lo" in ifconfig output that means no driver loaded and ... no tools to load. I could try slitaz forums ...but it runs really really slow far from how 214 runs.

Flash, I read that article when its links weren't broken yet. The guy had machine even worse than mine. His prices are too high, I can buy for half and cheaper, however I cannot see any sense to invest some tangible money in this vintage machine.
But the main idea is good. I used to assemble FreeBSD that way. So why not to try Slackware, Debian or Gentoo (I heard it's closest to FreeBSD) and then add packages or even compile some... The problem is I played with FreeBSD having enough space on hdd to rebuild kernels and userland and I had networking and cdrom )
Anyway thanks for reminding me the idea.

Greengeek, it seems you are right and this only make the problem worse: I could be unable to fix it without a developer's help.
But in you first post (that was hijacked ) somebody sounds like a developer promised to fix problems with update soon. Since it was a year ago the update should be done. So...it wasn't?

Cthisbear, the model is Xircom RealPort 10/100 Ethernet Card (RE100).
As to what exactly 2.14 .... it's a good question! I'm sure it was Top10 and now I went to check...
When I got my first problem with X a user bigpup, thanks him a lot, advised me to try 2.14X. I followed his link and downloaded 2.14Top10, as I expect it's the latest update.
Somehow only now I noticed that that thread has 323 pages and I took download from the first one! Can it be if it was instead the oldest Top10?
I also noticed that there a many "pets" in the tread and I didn't pay attention to that! What if one of them can fix my problem?
But most amazing...
In my post I wrote that managed to boot 2.17.1 but got X problem...
I just cannot believe this: I forgot that I boot 2.17.1! But I tried then and I couldn't boot it anymore! I'm really confused... looks I must read all the 323 pages + try 2.17.1 again.

With 2 others same old song: pup_whatever.sfs not found. Drop...BTW what it really means: not found?

That means that the bootloader could not locate the puppy files where it was expecting them. Can be caused by a spelling mistake in a file name or folder name usually. Or maybe the files are in a totally different folder.

Looks like a spelling mistake in that last line "inird.gz" - is that a direct copy from the menu.lst or just a forum typo?

Quote:

the model is Xircom RealPort 10/100 Ethernet Card (RE100).

Have you tried the "Pulp" puppies I mentioned? On my CD of Pulp 0.02 I had written a note that it worked well with Xircom pcmcia cards - so just might be worth another try.

Quote:

As to what exactly 2.14 .... it's a good question! I'm sure it was Top10 and now I went to check...
Somehow only now I noticed that that thread has 323 pages and I took download from the first one! Can it be if it was instead the oldest Top10?

Top10 is the newest. The developer (ttuuxxx) updates the first post each time he releases a new one.

Good luck, I hope you find a puppy that boots and connects consistently.

Not so good so far...
217 refused to connect after I tried to fix 214. The files vmlinuz and initrd.gz (it was a typo, sorry) are located in different directories for each release under /boot but all the .sfs file are altogether in root so I'm afraid that some correlation may take place. I removed now everything and start over with freshly extracted files. I started again with sol wary5.3: "puppy_wary_5.3.sfs not found" again.

"Not found" problem (the words perhaps should be written on my tombstone ) is about .sfs files. Those files are supposed to be in root (?) and there they are.
Indeed some of them are extracted with names in upper case or first letter in upper case... puppy_wary_5.3.sfs even was extracted as "Puppy_war.sfs" so I always rename them.
I do .iso extraction in win98 with WinRar and this bothers me a bit on the other hand I cannot pull hdd each time for each version: I would finally make the hdd (or cable that is worse) unusable...
So I do download and extraction on XP machine and transfer files with crossover network cable to win98 on that laptop.
Anyway I know that sometimes extracting tool matters...this still bothers me. Also...maybe windows renames somehow incorrectly?
This is very weird: I'm checking naming and location and lines in menu.lst every time and still "not found"
BTW when I tried DSL-4.4.10 (2008) it also couldn't find "Knoppix" that is analog to sfs file in Puppy.

I downloaded pulp003.doc and renamed it to iso. Of course I'll try it and report.
Right now I'll try pUPnGO again: I like what I saw about it.
Thank you very much for your attention.

The files vmlinuz and initrd.gz (it was a typo, sorry) are located in different directories for each release under /boot but all the .sfs file are altogether in root

Not all .sfs are treated the same. The one "main" sfs for each version of puppy needs to go INSIDE the subfolder along with the initrd.gz and vmlinux for the puppy. (I have attached a pic of my first hard drive, showing all the different subfolders that hold the various puppies I use. You can see that the special .sfs files for other programs live OUTSIDE of the subfolders.

Quote:

Indeed some of them are extracted with names in upper case or first letter in upper case... puppy_wary_5.3.sfs even was extracted as "Puppy_war.sfs" so I always rename them.
I do .iso extraction in win98 with WinRar and this bothers me a bit

Yes, this does sound a bit odd. Hopefully you will be able to end up with the right outcome somehow.

I have also attached a pic showing the contents inside my Pulp03 folder (you will not have the .2fs savefile yet...).

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